Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We have Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our staging and development environments. We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our production servers. It is the only Linux operating system that we are using in our company. I do not think we will change it. We will stay with it.

We started with CentOS, so it is quite similar. We have various features, and it is stable. The updates and upgrades are stable. This is the most important thing for my company. We are a gambling company. Reliability and performance are the most important for us. We like to press the update button and have an updated operating system after one, two, three, or five minutes. The most important thing about Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it is a stable operating system.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Docker daemons have been running for years without any problems. It is very stable. We are happy with it.

Every time we did an update or upgrade for the operating system or some dependencies, it worked well. It was very fast and stable. We are not afraid to press the button. We are happy with it.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux keeps our organization agile. We are running some Docker applications. They are not our production applications. We are running some containers. It is very quite easy.

We use Red Hat Insights, and we are happy with Red Hat Insights in urgent situations due to security issues, noncompliant settings, or unpatched systems.

Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. We have not had any problems.

It is a very stable operating system. We are not afraid to upgrade it.

If I want GUI, its GUI is better than other open-source operating systems. I prefer it for package management for sure. I am happy with it.

At the moment, I am happy with it. I cannot think of any areas for improvement. We have everything. The biggest challenge that we had was the migration from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but after some tests, it was easy.

We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for almost two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We plan to increase its usage.

We are partners of Red Hat. We have support, so we are good. 

Positive

We were using CentOS. The architect in my company chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we were already partners with Red Hat.

We are mostly on-prem. We are trying to migrate our applications to the cloud. We are using Azure Cloud.

The main data center that we have is in Ireland, but we are serving a lot of countries. We have small data centers for some countries. We have 2,000 VMs in Ireland, and we also have VMs in other countries. We have almost five data centers. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in all of them.

Migration from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a big challenge, but Red Hat had software to migrate and convert all CentOS VMs to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was an adventure in the beginning, but after some tests, it was easy. We migrated and converted almost 2,000 VMs in two to three months, and we had only ten cases where the migration failed, but it was our fault. We were happy.

For migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we created a template and made the changes that we wanted. We ran some Ansible Playbooks, and we created the VMs.

We used a consultant from Red Hat the first time.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would advise going for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of support. There would be someone who already knows about your issue and can help you in a couple of hours. There is no need to spend time fixing the issue by yourself. Imagine running Ubuntu and having a production issue. You need someone to guide you.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to centralize development. Our company is based on the .NET language. Our developers do not care about our infrastructure. They develop their applications, and we deploy them in OpenShift. We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for other services, such as MongoDB, Postgres, and our logging infrastructure. We use it for Elasticsearch, Graylog, and Docker services. Our applications do not run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. They are running on CoreOS for OpenShift.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. It is stable. We are not afraid to upgrade it. We are happy to use it. This operating system is for us. 

We mainly use RPM-based systems to give our developers virtual machines.

The most valuable features of using RHEL for us are the standard way to run Linux and tools like NetworkManager. They make things easier for us.

I prefer a product that offers everything in a yearly subscription, like VMware, and I think RHEL should consider offering it as well.

I have been using RHEL for 15 years.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We use RHEL deployed in different zones, only on-premise, not in the cloud. Deploying RHEL depends on the end user, but migrations aren't usually a problem due to site forwards. The hardest part is dealing with end-user applications on the machines. We use Ansible for scripting, especially with Oracle. Sometimes, meeting the end of life for RHEL versions is tough, and we have had to buy extended support for RHE because some applications reached the end of life within a year. I appreciate the extended support option, though I prefer not to use it.

RHEL's pricing and licensing are quite expensive. For a big company, paying these fees might be manageable, but as a government organization, spending tax money on such expensive solutions is challenging, even though we do have the funds.

I see benefits in using RHEL because it offers stability and long-term support. Although we use both RHEL and Ubuntu, I have noticed that updates in Ubuntu can change things unexpectedly within a main release, which I don't like. That is why I focus on RHEL for its consistent and reliable updates.

RHEL's built-in security features are very good for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. We apply security guidelines in Linux using RHEL, which provides all the necessary baselines. We can choose and apply what we need directly to our RHEL systems.

I would say that open-source cloud-based operating systems like Debian are stable and have been around for a long time. There is a whole community supporting it, making it a strong alternative to RHEL with fewer licensing costs.

Overall, I would rate RHEL as a nine out of ten.

Red Hat Enterprise Linunx's most valuable feature is patching. 

I am not happy with Red Hat's support. It is difficult to find knowledgeable people. It's hard to troubleshoot. 

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linunx since 2009. 

We used Solaris before Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Solaris' environment is closed, while Red Hat Enterprise Linunx is open-source. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linunx's knowledge base is good, and you can find answers there. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

For the past couple of years, our contractor team has been engaged with the Department of Veterans Affairs, focusing on developing and deploying software and containers and we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for that.

One of the most valuable aspects is the ease of installing packages on the server. When we need to run specific software, adding and installing packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite straightforward.

When we initially began working with containers, we encountered some challenges with compatibility. Red Hat provided an older and somewhat outdated version of Docker, which made the early stages of our container journey more challenging than I would have preferred.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for three years.

The customer support they provide is highly commendable. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

I've mainly used Windows on my computer or laptop. However, it was a different scenario when we were developing in the cloud and were given Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to work with.

We regularly perform upgrades on our OpenShift clusters, typically on a monthly basis. When it comes to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, we frequently update the images on our virtual machines to ensure that we stay current with the latest versions. We're actively working on implementing automation using Ansible to streamline and facilitate these tasks.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for production applications. 

We are a Managed Service Provider. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us not to be worried about vulnerabilities, security, and patching.

The most valuable features are the subscriptions and upgrades. 

We need to have more flexibility on the developed versions. Not everybody is ready to subscribe to enterprise versions. They would like to test the tool without subscriptions. 

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its security. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with AWS. We started our practice with AWS, and most customers use it instead of GCP or Azure. We use the product in a hybrid environment, mostly when shifting the containers or existing workloads from legacy systems. 

Most of the customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is the only approved OS. The tool's knowledge base is good but is limited to subscriptions. 

The upgrade migration is straightforward. For the initial projects, we used to execute CLI scripts. We plan to upgrade the system if everything works well in the lower environment. 

I have used the image builder feature. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

I'm a consultant, and our customers use this product. I work for a company that works with this product. I mostly work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do designs of infrastructure projects from the bottom to the top. We install Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the system level. Based on the application requirements, we design, configure, and update the systems.

Our customers use it as a basic operating system on which they deploy applications. They have enterprise application servers such as Tomcat or custom applications that need an operating system.

I've worked with it both on-prem and on the cloud. It depends on the client. On the cloud, the cloud providers are both AWS and Azure. This also depends on the clients, but it's mostly AWS and Azure.

Mostly, our customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its performance and security. They want to have an operating system that is supported and secure because they don't want to spend too much time supporting a Linux version that is not enterprise. They want an enterprise product that is secure so that they don't have to think about it all the time.

It isn't difficult for our customers to move workloads between the cloud and the data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The integration from on-prem to the cloud is quite easy because the operating system is the same. The operating system works the same in both places, so it's easy.

It has helped our customers avoid cloud vendor lock-in because they didn't need to buy a specific subscription from a cloud vendor or use a specific operating system from a cloud vendor and change the code of their application in relation to that. It's important to have a solution that avoids cloud vendor lock-in because they can move freely from one system to another system without any issues.

It has saved costs for our customers because it's a stable operating system, and they have no problem with security, patching, and so on. The operating system and the environment are stable. It works everywhere without any issues, so the development of the applications is not impacted by the system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to use and well-supported.

Support is most valuable. If a customer has a problem with a feature or a bug, we can open a support case for that, and the issue is resolved or taken care of. That's the main benefit of the product.

The resiliency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite good. 

Some low-level aspects, such as the file system support, can be improved. There are a lot of file systems that are supported by other Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a little behind those. For example, BTRFS is a file system that is not supported by Red Hat.

Some of our customers use the image builder tool to build the golden image to deploy to the cloud or to build a custom image to deploy on the cloud or on-prem. The golden image created by the image builder tool is good. It's the golden image. It works without any issues. However, the build process of image builder could be improved because it's not up to the standard or at par with other tools that build the golden image. However, it's quite useful and quite easy to use. It's not a big problem, but it could be improved. There is not a lot of information about how to use it. The process is not as well documented as the other parts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat is very good, but it could be improved and made much easier to search. Currently, the best way to find an article in the knowledge base is by using Google Search. By searching on Google, we can find the right knowledge base article, but it isn't easy to find information by using the search option within the knowledge base.

I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the last four years.

It's very stable. I didn't have any issues with the stability of the product most of the time.

Its scalability is very good. It scales very well in the right infrastructure.

Their support is good. It's one of the best support in the IT world for a product because you always get a response for every bug or issue. Overall, I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

They were using Ubuntu.

It's straightforward. It's pretty easy to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It can be difficult based on the workflow of the client, but overall, it's pretty straightforward to deploy on the cloud environment because all cloud providers support the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The golden image of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is compatible with every cloud provider. There is a feature in the cloud console for joining the Red Hat Enterprise Linux account with the cloud account, so you can create cloud images from the console. It's pretty easy from that.

Our customers have seen an ROI because after they choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they stay with the product and renew the subscription. It's a good investment for the IT department.

Its licensing is pretty confusing. There are a lot of subscriptions, and it isn't always clear which subscription is the best, but with their support, it's easy to find the right one.

Our customers sometimes buy it directly from the cloud provider, but most of the time, they have a hybrid infrastructure, so they already have some kind of subscription, and they use that subscription on the cloud.

We evaluated other options, but other options don't provide the support and stability that come with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

To someone who is looking at open source cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that if they are looking for an enterprise OS on a cloud environment and they want to have some stability and security, Red Hat is the perfect match for that.

Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.

We are running our critical applications on it. We are using versions 7, 8, and 9, and we are running our workload on private clouds. We are currently testing Azure, but we don't have the production workload on it. 

By implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we wanted to solve some of the reboot problems of Windows. Every patch on Windows affected our applications because the system had to be rebooted. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved the uptime of the applications.

For our company, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very secure operating system. It's much better than the Windows system. It's great for us. SELinux is a great tool to protect us from attackers. SELinux is the most important for us.

We have been Agile for two years, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a part of it.

Its stability is most valuable. I'm a technical guy, and I love Linux. For me, it's the best platform.

Writing SELinux policies is sometimes very hard if you want to deploy a new application on it.

I started working in 2006, and my first job was administering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. 

It's very stable.

Its scalability is extremely good. You can scale it everywhere if you want. We have 600 to 700 Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. 

The support from Red Hat is very good. The response time is rather low. We have premium support, and we sometimes get an answer to our questions in one hour. If you explain to the support guy your problem, you will get the current answer. Overall, I'd rate them a nine out of ten because you sometimes get someone who doesn't understand your question.

I don't know about the knowledge base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I know the knowledge base of OpenShift is very good now. In the past, it was updated in one single version, whereas now, the change is there for each major and minor version. There is separate documentation, and that's much better than in the past.

Positive

It's getting better and better. In the past, versions 3 and 4 were very complex, but now, it's very easy to do it. We are now creating images and deploying it on our VMware farms, and it's much easier than making a PXE boot from our bare metal systems. 

We evaluated other solutions. We went for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of better handling. It might also have been cheaper, but I'm not sure. My company decided to go with Red Hat.

As an operating system, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

Currently, we're running our web servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

It improves our security posture, especially around patching. It has built-in security features for risk reduction and maintaining compliance. SELinux, which is basically the default firewall provided by Red Hat, allows me to secure myself in terms of the network ports that are exposed or enabled, which reduces the risk. When you have a web server, you have a public IP, and for the public, it's easy to do a port scan on that particular public IP, but when you do implement proper security controls in terms of firewalls, you're able to enable only those ports that you need for communication. For example, for a web server, you'll enable port 443 for HTTPS and one or two extras for a particular requirement for Tomcat or something else. The setup and configuration are quite easy. OS-level patching is a big deal for us for maintaining compliance. With the enterprise subscription, you do get patches as soon as they're released by Red Hat.

It helps with portability. I can take a snapshot of my Red Hat virtual machine and restore it anywhere regardless of the virtualization platform, as long as the processor architecture stays the same. For example, if you're doing a backup and restore from a RISC-based processor, you can always restore it to any other RISC-based processor. Similarly, if you're taking a backup or a snapshot on any X86-based processor, you can restore it on the same processor architecture, regardless of the platform you're running. It could be Dell, IBM, or something else. Portability is a huge but often understated feature. It means that if a server has gone down, regardless of the issue, when I have the backup, I can get my services back online in a matter of minutes by just doing a snapshot restore from one server to another, or from one container platform to another. It enables me to have the highest levels of uptime for my applications. Of course, it's also impacted by the hardware I'm running. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in that aspect.

Standardizing our web applications with Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to take advantage of automating some of the workflows. For example, previously when I had a mixture of different distributions, if I wanted to deploy a particular setting across all of them, I had to do configurations on each distribution separately, whereas now, all my web servers are running on Red Hat, so I can create a simple YAML script and apply the same configuration across all of them. 

In terms of development also, configurations have been evened, and when you're taking advantage of open-source tools, it even becomes easier. We've integrated some of the native tools, such as YAML, into our CI/CD pipelines, and it's easy for our developers to deploy the same source code across different servers. For example, if you have Application A that is clustered across three or four servers, you can easily use that one single pipeline and do the same configuration across all three clustered servers. It saves us time. We are also getting a bit of quality control because we are sure that the same configuration has been applied to all three clustered servers. It has enabled us to centralize the process of DevOps in our organization.

The first one is security. Initially, the reason for going for Red Hat was mostly around security because our web servers are normally public-facing, but now, all the other distributions have probably also caught up in terms of security settings. 

Aside from security, the advantage of Red Hat as compared to the other distributions is the availability of support and patching. When you have an enterprise subscription with Red Hat, you get support and patching. If you're deploying a new product in the market and you're not sure of its compatibility with Red Hat, you can easily reach out to their support team, and they'll be able to guide you about whether they support that particular product and how far have they gone in terms of testing how Red Hat works with that particular product. For example, we were deploying a new Nginx server a few months ago, and we were not sure whether the latest version was supported by Red Hat. We had a support call and got one of the engineers into a session, who was able to take us through the level of support provided by the Red Hat operating system for the latest Nginx application. Support is very crucial in such cases. Patching is also crucial. In the case of any common vulnerability exposure that has been or can be exploited, you can rely on Red Hat to quickly patch that vulnerability.

One of the reasons for preferring Red Hat is that you can run it on X86-based hardware from Intel or AMD, or you can run it on RISC processors, such as IBM or Sun Microsystems. In terms of portability, it's supported by all the virtualization platforms out there, such as Hyper-V, VMware, and OpenShift for containers. For portability, I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

Deploying clusters on Red Hat, as well as on Oracle Linux, is a bit involving. I'd like them to simplify the setup or at least give meaningful log files to be able to see what's happening at the cluster level. 

It has been close to 10 years since we have been using it in our organization, but personally, I've dealt with Red Hat in production for two years.

It's quite stable. I haven't had any issues in terms of performance and stability with my Red Hat servers. If I have an issue, it's normally a hardware-related issue or a storage-related issue. It's rarely at the OS level.

It's quite scalable. I personally haven't had any issues in terms of scaling Red Hat, be it in a virtual machine or be it through a container. I haven't had any issues in terms of scaling. I do know one limitation they have, but it applies to very few people. For example, the amount of RAM they support does not reach one terabyte. However, I've not had a use case where I needed to have one terabyte of RAM on one particular server.

We have around 20 Red Hat servers. They're distributed across Azure and on-premise. They're normally running web services. Most of the applications they run are accessed by everyone in the organization, and there are 3,000 to 5,000 users.

So far, I've not had an incident for which I needed to take their support. I have not yet contacted Red Hat support.

We were mainly running CentOS, but then Red Hat dropped their support for CentOS. For us, our security posture is highly important. Our major pain point was around patching. Whenever we had any vulnerable web servers exposed to the public internet, we were not able to get patching for any CVEs that were found. That's why we switched our web servers to Red Hat. Patching was Red Hat's main advantage. In terms of security features and control, such as user management and permissions, Red Hat is quite similar to other distributions. I don't see any difference in terms of other aspects. The switch wasn't because of a lack of features, but after switching to Red Hat, we are now exposed to their enterprise features or tools, such as OpenShift. So, our investment in Red Hat was because of their support and patching.

We have deployed Red Hat on-prem on Hyper-V. We've also deployed Red Hat on-prem on VMware, and we also have Red Hat on Azure Cloud. In terms of version, we have everything from 7.2 and all the way to 7.6. We currently don't have any real deployment of version 8 or version 9.

I'm the person who does most of the deployments. The deployment is quite easy. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of deployment. Deploying Red Hat would be quite easy even for a beginner system administrator because it guides you during the deployment. It asks you whether you want to use a feature or what features you want to install alongside the operating system. Do you want a file server, or do you want a web server? The installation is quite straightforward and simple.

For me, normally the complete configuration from deploying the OS and managing storage, users, and security takes less than 30 minutes. In less than 30 minutes, I'm usually up and running.

We do everything in-house. We don't use any third-party help. Usually, I do all the deployments myself, but I also have an assistant. So, we currently have two people: me and my assistant.

It doesn't really require any maintenance. It just requires occasional patches. That's also handled by me and my assistant.

There is definitely an ROI. Automation definitely reduces the time taken to implement a particular task and the number of employees needed to do the same task. For me, it's majorly in terms of automation, uptime, and availability. The fact that Red Hat is quite portable means that whenever one of my systems goes down, I can easily just take a snapshot and get my services back online. 

Their licensing is quite okay. It isn't expensive, and it's slightly cheaper than Microsoft. Taking into account its features, its price is okay.

Support is something that serious enterprises would want to have. The advantage of running an open-source tool is that you do not have to pay for the tool in terms of licensing, but you don't have support. In certain situations, you might need support. For example, when one of your systems goes down, but you do not have the expertise internally to recover it. Depending on the industry you're working with, having downtime might not be optimal or might be costly. It might even be costlier than paying for the support or licensing of Red Hat.

Apart from support, for organizations that have some of their services exposed to the public internet, security is very important. They would want the patches for the latest common vulnerability exposures found to be affecting the particular systems they are running. So, support and security are the key features why any serious organization should choose Red Hat as opposed to an open-source tool.

We evaluated other options, but they were probably inadequate. We had the option of using AIX, but it wasn't portable for our use case. 

It's normally an issue of balancing the cost of support and the features that you are looking to achieve. If security is number one to any organization, Red Hat is a no-brainer. If support is a key issue, Red Hat again is a no-brainer. If you're facing any security or support issues, I'd recommend going with a distribution that has some sort of licensing tied to it.

I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.